Torn Apart

Nothing Changed At All

Timothy stared down at the shreds of pink fluff in his hands. Why was he holding pink fluff? And why were his hands trembling?

His clothes were not his clothes either. He was dressed in some kind of skin-tight black suit with gray dots every few inches. He could even feel it on his scalp-had they shavedhis head? He reached up to find the rubbery suit perfectly matching the curve of his head.

Lab. He grabbed the fragment, trying to follow it before it vanished. Some kind of lab. Why would they be interested in him? Unless...

He lifted his head. He stood in a concrete room with a square floor about ten by ten feet. A chair. A table. A whiteboard and dry erase marker, the former filled with paragraphs of writing, or a word repeated over and over. Pieces of a dummy scattered on the ground. Actually it looked like a few dummies. And a lot of pink fluff.

One wall was half-filled with a darkened window. Probably one way glass. Two speakers hung at the upper corners on either side of the mirror.

"Drop in the next dummy."

Someone had left the mic on. A man's voice, irritated, but speaking to someone else. Timothy scanned the small room again. There. A door. He'd missed it the first time. He darted for it.

"Stop."

His wife's voice brought him to a screeching halt, his fingers inches from the door knob. Her voice had come over the speakers. Was she behind the window?

"Teles. What is going on?" His tongue was thick in his mouth. So dry. How long had he been there? Had he started to lose time? He didn't recall coming to this room.

And his wife wasn't answering.

He looked down at his suit again. He was a cook, not a scientist, but if those little gray dots weren't some kind of sensor he'd eat his apron. And if those were sensors, they weren't interested in him as much as his reactions.

To her voice.

"I know, I know, I want to get to the philanthropic implications of this too, but those people aren't the ones writing the checks right now. These guys want to know offensive capabilities." The irritated male voice pitched up and punctuated itself with a sigh. "Just drop the dummy in. Let's see if the conditioning has set. Subject is not to speak this time."

"Teles," Timothy croaked, "You have to tell me what's going on. What are they-"

Four ceiling panels pulled back. It wasn't the door they came through, it was the ceiling. A rack of dummies lowered to the floor, five white cloth bodies topped by mounds of different colored wigs. Yellow, brown, red, pink, purple-

Destroy the target with the pink hair. On completion, forget what you have been told and what you have done.

He blinked. His hands were full of pink fluff and he stood in the middle of a pile of dummy parts. How many dummies were there, and why was he in a room with spare dummy parts? There were four dummies rising back into the ceiling. They were untouched.

A male voice crackled from speakers set over a nearby window, too dark to see through. Probably one way glass. "First successful test, unprompted by Subject's speech. Subject is capable of mental conditioning."

......

"We'll probably have to do the confrontation outside." Arthur slouched in his chair, tapping the dish in front of him with the tip of a metal finger. "Inside the mansion's no good. If Dulcie gets snatched right away then Lewis goes, and the whole mansion with him. No good everyone falling and getting injured."